Dating Website Suffered Data Breach

The world still remembers the high-profile dating website data breach at Ashley Madison: at the time, the hackers released the personal data of 37m users in order to reveal the dishonesty of the service which encouraged married men to “get an affair” and did not wipe information about their accounts even after being paid for doing so. That breach was the largest but not the last – Guardian Soulmates became the latest dating website whose user details have been exposed.

According to media reports, users of the dating website Guardian Soulmates have received explicit emails after the data breach. Guardian News and Media, which has run the online dating website for the last 13 years, confirmed that the email addresses and Soulmates usernames were exposed by a 3rd-party service provider. Guardian News and Media has received more than two dozen inquiries from its members that present evidence of their email addresses used for Soulmates account having been exposed. The company launched investigations that found out that it was the fault of a human error by one of its third-party technology providers, which resulted in an exposure of an extract of data.

The company also explained that the problem has already been fixed, but while it persisted, Soulmates members’ publicly available online dating profiles could be found via the leaked data. Guardian News and Media emphasizes that no other personal information, including credit card details, was compromised in the data breach. The company brought its apologies for the exposure of usernames and email addresses, encouraged affected users to contact its support service, and promised to take appropriate measures to prevent this from happening again.